The Bottom Billion

In our interconnected world, if we want to be safe, we need to protect those most vulnerable among us.

The family of economist Amartya Sen befriended the great literary Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. It was precisely Tagore who gave the newborn Sen the name Amartya, which means “immortal” in Bengali, not knowing that he was witnessing the birth of another Bengali Nobel laureate. Leaving India and working at Cambridge and Harvard universities, Amartya Sen became an expert on issues of social assistance to the poor and economic and social justice. He worked out ways to assess the status of…